Military Contractor With $100,000 Belt Buckle Is Found Guilty

[ProSense]

Military Contractor With $100,000 Belt Buckle Is Found Guilty

By A. G. SULZBERGER

A former military contractor who made bullet-resistant vests and other body armor used in Iraq and Afghanistan was convicted on Tuesday of fraudulently enriching himself from company funds through the kind of extravagant spending exemplified by his purchase of a $100,000 belt buckle.

The contractor, David H. Brooks, the former chief executive and chairman of DHB Industries, was convicted of 17 counts, including insider trading and securities fraud, stemming from what prosecutors described as corporate looting and stock-trading schemes that made him more than $190 million.

The verdict, reached after 13 days of deliberation over five weeks by a federal jury in Central Islip, N.Y., capped a theatrical eight-month trial that stood out from other recent corporate malfeasance cases both because of the unusual details regarding Mr. Brooks’s once lavish lifestyle and because of his public unraveling since his arrest.

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Mr. Brooks and Ms. Hatfield each face up to 25 years in prison on the most serious counts when Judge Joanna Seybert sentences them. Mr. Brooks faces at least two more trials, one for tax evasion and another for contempt of court. He is also under investigation on suspicion of jury tampering, based on notes that officials have discovered.

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Some background here

[Botany]

1. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have let certain people and groups ...

.... make / steal billions if not trillions of dollars. They never were about keeping us safe from terror.

[denverbill]

2. Hmm. $25000 to the RNC in 2005. I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you.n/t

[Ian David]

3. And if our troops bought body armor from another company on their own...

... they had to mail it back home.

Or else they wouldn't receive death benefits if they were killed while wearing it.

[era veteran]

4. Flagrant War Profiteering

Hang Him